Sunday, May 21, 2017

Did you read the New Yorker piece, "The Personal-Essay Boom is Over"? It pretty much summed up how I've been feeling about so much online content -- writing blogs, reading blogs, tweeting links to blogs -- I weeded my feed reader aggressively a few months back, have pretty much only been reading posts from former Sassy staffers, The Pool, and a handful of libraryland sites.

A machine intelligence might intuit I'm depressed, which with all of the family drama and the horrific and divisive political landscape, that isn't off base...I can't help but notice that my web-based reticence pretty much maps to the presidential administration. Obviously, the daily social media proclamations from the White House have brought a whole new level of scrutiny to online microinteractions.

As much as I believe in transparency, it just seems any candid statement can come back to bite you in completely unanticipated ways. And, after some very bad repercussions from what I thought of as sheer observation, I'm downright reluctant to share anything that isn't 110 percent cheerleader-y because you never know who's watching or who will scroll back absolute years in your accounts like every horrible and alarmist "digital footprint" lesson warns.

Anyway, I used to find the interwebs stimulating, now I just find them tiring. Thanks for reading, though.